Selective Silence: Remastered
A short story from the Project X Series
Every day, we give up tiny pieces of ourselves to digital systems we barely even understand. We scroll, swipe, and smile for the algorithm, happily feeding data into machines built by billionaires who swear they're changing the world—for our benefit, of course.
It always starts small: a notification swiped away, an update with terms no one actually reads, or another trending hashtag that you won't remember tomorrow.
Nothing alarming. Pretty routine.
Until it isn’t.
I’ve been meaning to revisit the Project X stories for a while, and now? It’s time.
Welcome back to Project X: Digital Dystopia. I’m your Narrator.
Tonight’s story is a familiar one—you may recognize it. Selective Silence. This story has been remastered for you all to enjoy.
Our subject: a civil rights attorney and her daughter—the unlikely author of a viral post titled “Strength in Unity: Why Civil Obedience Is the Real Revolution.”
Yikes.
Billionaires have always been good at reducing humans to numbers—but now, they’ve found something even more efficient: silence. These days, the elite can purchase premium “silence insurance” plans to protect their Social Scores by suppressing dissent.
Not metaphorically. Literally.
Roll the tapes.
To see a complete list of stories in the Project X series, click the link below.
Project X: Digital Dystopia and Dark Speculative Fiction
Every day we surrender a little more control to digital systems we barely understand. We're not just scrolling; we're slipping into a future built from data we willingly give away.
Selective Silence.
My mother’s voice was my first rebellion. She didn’t sing for fame—she sang because every note was a challenge to the silence they wanted us to live under. In court, her words rang like gospel, turning stale legal proceedings into morning prayers.
Her mornings were a ritual of defiance. I’d tiptoe into the kitchen, catch the scent of dark roast mingling with faded sheet music. Steam curled from her mug like sacramental incense, and she’d launch into protest hymns the world had outlawed—riots of ’25, verses scrubbed from history, sung out loud anyway.
Those banned choruses are etched into my memory.
She carried an entire library of resistance in her throat—until billionaires decided that some books needed to burn.
I was twelve when I ruined my life.
I didn’t understand yet why Mom waged holy war against StarNet, the Social Score or every Executive Order President Douglas spat out.
There’s aways space at StarNet for you.
Engage. Connect. Join a Community.
Who wouldn’t sign up?
One tap later, I had a glittering Social Score stamped to my name. At first, it was electric. My feed lit up with stars—badges, leaderboard notifications. I joined a couple of “Rising Voices” forums, dropped a few hot takes about “maintaining civic harmony,” and…nothing.
No likes. No shares. The algorithm hated me. Hated my voice.
Scrolling through the endless feed, every leaderboard, ever verified account, there seemed to be… a strategy to it. A pattern. I recognized it immediately. Strategic post to farm engagement—controversy, hope, contrarian, nostalgia—every post was formulated to get a response from someone.
But all they needed was one.
My first real post had to be perfect. I had to draw the right kind of attention from the right people.
What are you thinking about?
The status box seemed innocent enough. I clicked.
Would you like AI to help you write?
I almost swiped the pop-up away—everyone knows that AI just spits out the same regurgitated mess… But this post is just to ‘feed the algorithm’ anyway. Couldn’t hurt, right?
I clicked.
Click, click, click, click, click. Ping!
Post “Strength in Unity: Why Civil Obedience is the Real Revolution”?
Yes
NoAudience?
Private
Only Me
Public
Next thing I knew, I was earning bonus points for posting “positive sentiment media.” A professor reposted my “Unity Through Order” sketch essay. It got featured. I even got Verified status.
My Metrics ticked up, up, up.
Invitations rolled in—from Youth Governance programs, influencer outreach panels, even an invite to beta test a pilot version of Silence Insurance. Just to “help model civic responsibility,” they said.
The paperwork seemed simple enough. I skimmed:
Blah, blah, blah 25 years of speech moderation, blah, blah a tiny update to the Neural Implant System—something, something, for the betterment of community, yadda yadda, in extreme cases, vocal suppression may be activated.
AGREE TO TERMS AND CONDITIONS.
It felt good.
It felt like I was doing something right. Like maybe Mom was wrong, and this was just the future growing pains she didn’t want to admit were necessary.
It would take four years for me to see the consequences.
4 Years Later
2 years after momma lost her license—apparently practicing law is anti-American—that’s when I realized that she was right.
About Douglas, about Yates, about everything.
I found her old case files stuffed in the walls. Actual paper, yellowing and fragile, stuffed between studs like dirty secrets. Hundreds of them. Evidence of everything Douglas did when he first reached for his crown: surveillance footage of activists being "escorted" into unmarked government vehicles. Children of politicians and judges who simply disappeared, their entire digital footprints scrubbed so clean it left scorch marks on the system.
Even a copy of the old constitution—the one Douglas claimed was deep-state propaganda, the one that still used words like "freedom" and "rights" without algorithmic qualifiers. Enough truth to burn this whole damn house of cards down…
As if on cue, the evening address began.
Douglas’s face glowed from every screen in the city, a flawless mosaic of propaganda. His heir-apparent son, Brad—perfect teeth, perfect hair, perfect rehearsed charm—launched into another polished speech about “bringing back the middle-class.”
The anger bubbled in my sternum and my fingers twitched towards my phone—because how dare they stand up there and lie so…so casually.
Then I saw it.
The dilated pupils, sweat glistening on his upper lip. Every time he swallowed, his face twitched like he was tasting acid—he was coked the hell out.
So I did something a little reckless.
I… posted a little "suggestion" to my followers. I insinuated that maybe the perfect son of the perfect president wasn't diving nose first into policy books late at night—but rather into something more… recreational.
Was it bold? Yeah, sure.
Did I think it would go anywhere? Of course not.
Just toss it into the digital void, and it’d go the way of democracy, right?
Wrong.
StarNet caught fire fast, and I got the notification minutes later.
Everything that mattered in the world shattered like porcelain: Social Score flatlined, Civic Score hemorrhaged, Verification status evaporated, Trust metrics plummeted into negative integers I didn't even know existed.
Fourteen words. That's all it took. Fourteen words tapped out at 3 AM, and I may as well have jumped from the forty-third floor of Douglas Tower. Trust me, I know exactly how fast that is—they don't scrub those security feeds as well as they think they do.
I planned to keep it to myself. To fix it alone. If I could just get some of the people from my community networks to leave me a positive review, maybe momma would never find out.
I was wrong.
The letter arrived on a Tuesday. I remember because it was raining—the kind of rain that makes everything look like it's drowning.
“Mom!” My feet tapped down the hardwood stairs. “Mom?”
When I reached the bottom step, I saw momma sitting in her chair holding a cream envelope, gold seal that caught the lightning like a warning. The Department of Civic Trust and Social Harmony.
Her friend, Amelia, sat next to her, a hand on momma’s knee. That’s when I knew the letter was bad.
Her eyes lifted from the letter. “Allison, please tell me that you didn’t tank your social score.” She rose from her seat, white knuckling the once-pristine paper.
I had never heard my mother raise her voice before—until that moment.
“Please tell me that this is a fucking mistake, Allison!”
“She didn’t know, B—” Amelia stood, a gentle hand on my mothers shoulder—that she jerked away from.
“—I’m not talking to you! I’m speaking to my daughter.” She turned back to me, eyes glossy with tears. What I heard was rage but what I saw…that was pain.
“I-I- I thought that I could fix it.” I murmured, eyes never leaving hers.
The silence was crushing.
In a single second, I watched mommas face twist and contort into a silent symphony of expressions: Anger, hurt, disappointment.
Fear.
“I know. I know, baby.” The letter slipped from her fingers, dropping to the couch as momma yanked me into a hug—one that felt heavy with the weight of my mistake.
“We’ll fix it. I’ll fix it.” She breathed into my hair and, in that moment, I wasn’t sure who she was trying to convince.
I knew that there was nothing she could do. My social score had tanked, my trust score was below nothing, my future was laid out in front of me—college was off of the table.
Unless both of us opted into Silence Insurance, of course.
Advanced speech moderation for me, the idiot daughter—and total suppression for my mother. That was how much my future cost.
It cost my mother everything.
You know what's worse than watching someone you love lose their voice? Knowing they lost it because of you. Knowing that every time they open their mouth and nothing comes out, it's because you couldn't keep yours shut.
These days, I watch her hands shake when she writes. I swear that the tremors get worse every time I check. The doctors say it's neurological—something about the suppression technology interfacing with the left hemisphere of the brain.
Slow degradation.
Her notebooks are everywhere now. Black ones, mostly.
She color-codes them: blue for memories, red for legal arguments, black for the nightmares. The pages are filled with increasingly desperate handwriting, but I can only make out a few words.
Sometimes I find pages where the same word is written over and over, as if she's trying to carve it into her mind before it slips away completely.
I wish she would’ve just let me suffer the consequences of my own damn actions.
From my window, I watch new protesters in the streets below. Young. Fierce. They don't know that one of their greatest champions lives in the apartment on the third floor, right above the main street, pressing her forehead against the glass, and mouthing words that will never again be heard.
Sometimes, in the quietest hours, I catch her standing in the kitchen, her mouth moving to rhythms I can't hear. Muscle memory of melodies that used to make this apartment a home.
I wonder if she still hears them in her head.
I don't ask. Or maybe I have, and the answer is lost somewhere in the silence between us.
But then she looks at me—really looks at me—and smiles.
And in that smile, I see every song she ever sang, every argument she ever made, every truth she ever fought for. All of it, distilled into one quiet moment with the person that cost her everything.
Remember: The truth is often carried by those who were forced into silence for survival. In turn, the loudest, most confident voices are often the most wrong.
Until the next story,
—The Narrator
If you’d like to return to the crossroads, you can do so HERE.
If you enjoyed this, consider checking out some of your Narrator’s favorite recent reads by clicking the links below.
you absolutely nailed this concept, and in doing so, you also made it flawlessly original. Silence Insurance is terrifying. never being able to sing again? that would kill me. the mother??? watching the protestors??? i loved this.